19 February 2013

A new Muon release is approaching and I wanted to use this occasion for sum up a little what happened in the Muon area, in view of the forthcoming 2.0 version.

The first thing you’ll notice is the version bump from 1.5 to 2.0. This is because the whole suite had 2 big changes. Firstly, Jonathan reworked libqapt which will be seeing a 2.0 version as well, and I refactored Muon’s internals so that we could have different back-ends in it.

I’m excited about this last change; not only for the features it’s already providing, like the KNS and Bodega backends, but for where I’d like it to go in the near future. We’ll know more about it soon though.

Another important change, was that we moved some of the Discover UI from QML to better integrate with the rest of KDE applications, specially by using a native scroll bar and prefer the main window’s toolbar to our custom buttons. I’m not much of a graphical person, but I’m quite happy about the result. I hope you are as well.

Here there’s a small video I made for you to see what’s going on in Muon Discover 2.0. I hope you like it and I hope you want it.

Personally, I think it looks great. @Miggs if you want to critique, how about doing it constructively by giving something a little more specific, with suggestions on how to improve it? Personally I love how much more visual this looks, with actual images, rather than just text labels for everything. I love how it integrates all kinds of disparate sources such as Plasmoids, comics, etc. Now I’m just hoping we can see this make it to Chakra Linux (where there is currently a lack of a gui packagae manager).

Great job! I must say this mixed sources was a great surprise! Maybe qapt batch & GetHotNewStuff could be replaced by it, so this guy would keep track of everything installed (and could at least an easy list of those — say, for an easier fresh OS install)!

I’m only hoping it’s not as limited as muon sw center so that we don’t keep needing muon package manager, for us to finally be able to actually concentrate our software management in it!

And if, I suggest, muon updater becomes a plasmoid everything just become awesomely simple! Rock on!

Hmmm … Thinking a bit through, maybe qapt-batch could be turned into a plasmoid, so it’d visually integrate with other similar tasks as downloads or file moving. Then it could do muon updater’s job by providing a list of upgradeable packages and process them.

I think the juicy part of muon discover is still QML so maybe some (or all) of these muon visuals could be more easily turned into plasmoid.

Also, thinking of the way my Android phone updates and installs stuff (and so iOS), maybe even muon discover should do what it does now but till providing a list to this qapt-batch-replacing-plasmoid to process.

This way we have notifications and other desktop resources plus visual system integration.

What about that?

I hope I’m contributing with ideas that would make muon to rock even more!

@Bugsbane just poke your distro developers to make a backend (I’m already doing so, now and then :)).

@JJanz It already keeps track of everything that’s installed, we only try not to show all the information at once, because then it becomes less useful. My plan for the moment is to make Discover as good as possible for installing and managing applications. If you want to deal with hardcore apt stuff you’ll have to go back to other software like muon package manager or the terminal. We need to draw the line somewhere. About the plasmoid updater, well it’s definitely an option. I’d like to think about updates all together first though.

I agree that Android (I’m not sure about how they work on iOS, honestly) updates have something to teach. The GNU/Linux distributions world is very conservative about automatic updates, and there’s a good reason for that, but on the other hand we’re being far too heavy. I hope I’ll have news in that subject.

1. list is easy to read, no waste of space, here we have no informations until hovering an icon
2. homepage with suggestions is just like ad for me, keep my attention on useless things
3. we must quit the list for details
4. screenshot bar take too much space
5. don’t like animations
6. Many smilies/plasmoid icon in comics/plasmoid categories, it’s ugly

I prefer KPackageKit.

What I like now:
1. screenshots separated from text
2. same for commentaries
3. clean toolbar
4. software sources management seems great

Please stop reinventing the wheel. What is needed most is stability, not a completely new package manager with every OS upgrade. And all the background processes and notifiers and watchers just eat up more memory and CPU. My netbook gets slower with every upgrade. I just gave up and use aptitude on all my systems. I don’t want an app store in Linux, I just want a simple package manager that makes it easier to do things that are cumbersome on the command line. CADT is a real problem.

D? you giv? some thought too on your oown an exhibitionist.
My absolute favorite way to ?ave money on foo? iss an entity called Anhel Foodd Ministries.
New girls are added every now annd then and y?u can try them ouut as ?ell.